Finding peace of mind in uncertainty (part 1)

When I was six years old, my mom would pick my older brother and me up after school and bring us to John Muir Hospital where she worked as a labor-and-delivery nurse. We stationed ourselves in a room labeled “Fathers’ Waiting Room,” a relic of the days when childbirth was regarded as something women did on their own, and men were given an update once it was all over.?

Of course, I didn’t know all that at the time. I simply saw it as home base for my brother’s and my unsupervised afternoon activities until my dad finished his work day and came to the hospital to bring us home for dinner. John Muir Hospital and that Fathers’ Waiting Room together were my figurative babysitter. They kept us company when we did our homework or snacked on the apple juice and saltines my mom brought us during her breaks, but also kindly turned a blind eye when we, defying directives, left the room and raced each other up and down the hospital hallways.

What I really loved were the slow days on the maternity ward, when my mom had time to take us to the nursery to see the newborn babies, swaddled and on display in the viewing window. We also toured the ward, saying “hi” to my mom’s co-workers, who invariably greeted us with welcoming smiles and a few cheerful words. There were always a couple nurses or doctors who took a break from their clinical duties to teach us how to use a stethoscope or take someone’s blood pressure. If it were a particularly good day, they took us to the break room for homemade cookies or brownies, dropped off earlier in the day by a grateful patient.

One afternoon, just as we were about to head back to the Fathers’ Waiting Room, Kathy, the nurse supervisor, asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up? Would you like to be a nurse like your mom?”

I stared blankly at her, unsure how to respond. I barely knew my multiplication tables, much less what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Barbara, one of the medical assistants, chimed in before I could say anything, “Or you could be a doctor. If you like babies, you could be a pediatrician or a neonatologist.”

Nee-oh-nay-tall-oh-gist. That word rolled around in my head for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure what a neonatologist did, but I knew I enjoyed spending time at the hospital and that I liked babies. If being a doctor also meant I could spend time with friendly folks like the ones my mom worked with and partake of homemade sweets, all the while helping people bring their babies into the world—it seemed entertaining like a good board game or books by Beverly Cleary were to me at the time.

As a kid, there was a set of questions that I got asked by adults, over and over again. How old are you? How did you get to be so big? How’s school? As I got older, I noticed that more people asked, just as Barbara had: What do you want to be when you grow up??

Rather than getting caught unprepared again, I began trying out my newfound answer: I want to be a doctor. At first, I was tentative, uncertain how adults would react. After a while, I exclaimed it with confidence, knowing by that point that my response would predictably elicit a nod of approval or words of support.

Each time I declared my intent to become a doctor, it became reinforced in my mind. The act of saying it out loud, over and over again, made me forget a time when I didn’t know what I wanted to be or that I should ever contemplate any other path. I began to adopt everyone’s enthusiasm for my decision as my own, never really pausing to ask myself: Do I really want to be a doctor, and do all the things that doctors do?

Instead what propelled me forward was that the medical world was familiar and comfortable, like a childhood friend I’d grown up with—from all those afternoons in the Fathers’ Waiting Room to the summers I spent on the home-birth circuit with my mom after she became a certified nurse-midwife (more on that later). I felt compelled to parlay those memories and warm feelings into a lifelong career in medicine.?

Even as I got older, there never seemed to be a reason to challenge or examine it. Everyone, including me, assumed my career choice was a good fit and, after all, it was a noble profession, in which one has the honor and privilege of caring for others.?

In fact, I was so single-minded that as a high school senior nearly all my college applications were for combined undergrad/medical school programs , which allow students to go straight from undergrad to medical school without having to complete a separate application process. It just felt right.

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Until it didn’t. In another post , I write about how, when the theoretical white coat became an actual one, I felt less like myself than I ever had. And despite the satisfaction—celebration, even—of surviving all the endless study sessions, overnight call, and stress of caring for my patients, and achieving outward symbols of success like the medical degree, board certification, and doctor’s salary—I was in a constant state of restlessness.

I was restless because of a fundamental misconception. As I got deeper into my training and practice, I could see that the profession I’d envisioned as a child didn’t match reality—and not in a good way. It seems so obvious to me now, but in fact it took years to accept that the warm memories of the hospitals and medical experiences of my childhood were simply those and nothing more, and didn’t mean I was destined to recapture them as a practicing physician.

I was restless because there were things about practicing medicine that I was captivated by, but not the day-to-day work of being an internist. Learning patients’ stories, understanding what made them tick, helping them overcome obstacles, and working with teams of people devoted to supporting patients through their most difficult times—these were incredibly motivating. However, I didn’t thrive on the daily routine of diagnosing and treating patients.?

I was restless yet struggled to generate momentum to leave. In clinical medicine, I was on a preset track, which made for a compelling argument to maintain the status quo. While becoming a doctor is not easy, there are well-outlined steps one takes to get there. Work hard, check the boxes, and you’ll eventually arrive at the destination. I was good at hitting those milestones. Questioning whether those were the right milestones for me—now that was a different story.

I was restless grappling with what my identity would be if I weren’t a practicing physician. Who was I without the white coat, the title—and, let’s face it, the social standing and prestige?

I was restless—and averse to—contemplating the work that any reinvention entails. My transition plan was murky at best. I foresaw an undetermined amount of time of uncomfortable exploration, pursuing answers to soul-searching questions. Even if I could fully accept that I didn’t want to practice medicine, perhaps the harder questions were: What do I want to do? Will I be good at anything else? And—most frightening of all—what if I discovered that I wasn’t good at anything else or I chose something that, just like clinical medical, also wasn’t the right fit??

And yet.?

Breaking through the doubts and fears was a voice inside my head that said: There’s something else out there for you. Go. Find. It. Don’t settle for another year, three years, 10 years, 25 years, 40 years—of being restless and dissatisfied.?

As the restlessness escalated, so did the voice, as if to convince me that the antidote was to embrace uncertainty. That the messy, unpredictable process of figuring out what else I could be—what else I should be—in the world would yield peace of mind and quell the restlessness.?

The inner voice kept playing in my mind over and over again, until I was ready to make it my outer voice, expressing out loud as much to myself as to others, that I was ready to embark on the quest for my “something else.” Now, I look back upon the many “something elses” since I left clinical medicine behind—the things I’ve explored, tried on for size, and experimented with—and can see how each one reinforced the peace of mind that comes with the freedom of exploring who you were meant to be.

Next month, in Part 2, I’ll share what happened when I embraced uncertainty and landed my first non-clinical job—in which I was paid to ask people for large sums of money and learned how to curtsy to members of the British aristocracy. It was a launch pad for a new career path that led me to where I am now—the co-founder of a creative agency that supports companies creating the next generation of healthcare.?

If you’d like to read that article once it’s published or check out others I’ve written, follow me on Substack . And, as always, drop me a line . I’d love to hear about how you've embraced uncertainty in your own life.